You've heard of Siri, Viv, Cortana and Echo – you've probably even used one of them. Powered by Artificial Intelligence, these increasingly clever digital assistants provide the user with instant access to information, from the weather forecast to amusing trivia. The most well-known of the bunch is probably Siri, developed by Apple and built in to all iPhones, iPads and Macs as standard. However, companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have released their own assistants. Samsung being the most recent tech giant to develop a competing product, revealing its new PA at the beginning of the month.

A few weeks ago I was emailing Tom Blomfield, the CEO of startup bank Monzo, to arrange lunch. He passed me over to his assistant, Amy Ingram, by CCing her into an email. Amy and I exchanged eight emails fixing up a date and then another five when Blomfield had to rearrange. Only then did I spot something odd in Amy's email signature: "Artificial intelligence for scheduling meetings." It turns out that I had been talking to an algorithm the whole time.

The IoT continued its toddler-like growth and stumbles in 2016. Here are five trends to look for in 2017 as the IoT enters its adolescence and how to benefit from them. Filling out a whole product value proposition through partnerships has repeatedly proven its importance across B2B and enterprise software sectors. In the IoT, they will be even more critical. As an example, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is driving the definition of platforms and test beds and should show results in 2017.

According to a set of intelligent humans interviewed for this story, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are going to help drive the tech economy in 2017. When CIO.com posted a query on Help a Reporter Out, a site designed to help journalists connect with sources, asking about startup trends to watch in 2017, the overwhelming majority of respondents pointed to AI. This coming year and beyond, AI will help companies "disrupt sectors that haven't been fully disrupted," says Anthony Glomski, principal of AG Asset Advisory, a financial advisory firm. "AI is in its beginning stages with massive potential impact." Here are eight startup categories and trends experts believe will be big in 2017.

Amazon's voice assistant Alexa has become a hugely popular and growing business. In fact, David Limp, an Amazon senior vice president who oversees Alexa and all of its Amazon devices, says that Alexa is rapidly adding "skills," with more than 1,000 people working on it. On Tuesday, at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference, Limp spoke to Fortune's Adam Lashinsky about the inspiration for Alexa (hint: Think Star Trek) and the origin of the name to where the business is heading. Here is the lightly-edited transcript. Dave Limp: The device business is less about building hardware for customers and more about building services behind that hardware. So the original vision of Kindle was to deliver any book ever written in less than 60 seconds, and that was all about creating a cloud-based service that had a great catalogue of books, great selection, and great prices. And as we've rolled out devices since then, everything from Fire TV to, as you mentioned, Echo and Alexa and everything in between, it's about creating that backend service that constantly improves and adds value for customers, and isn't just a gadget but instead a full end to end service that can benefit what customers want.

Amazon.com Inc. is developing a premium Echo-like speaker with a screen, a sign the world's largest online retailer is trying to capitalize on the surprise success of its voice-controlled home gadgets and fend off competition from Google and Apple Inc. The new device will have a touchscreen measuring about seven inches, a major departure from Amazon's existing cylindrical home devices that are controlled and respond mostly through the company's voice-based Alexa digital assistant, according to two people familiar with the matter. This will make it easier to access content such as weather forecasts, calendar appointments, and news, the people said. They asked not to be identified speaking about a product that has yet to be announced. The latest Amazon speaker will be larger and tilt upwards so the screen can be seen when it sits on a counter and the user is standing, one of the people said.

A few weeks ago I was emailing Tom Blomfield, the CEO of startup bank Monzo, to arrange lunch. He passed me over to his assistant, Amy Ingrams, by CCing her into an email. Amy and I exchanged eight emails fixing up a date and then another five when Blomfield had to rearrange. Only then did I spot something odd in Amy's email signature: "Artificial intelligence for scheduling meetings." It turns out that I had been talking to an algorithm the whole time.

San Francisco,Nov30:Riva-Melissa Tez was searching online for research that might help her father. He'd gone into a coma after suffering a stroke, and she wondered what the latest recommendations said--whether playing music to him in his native language could keep him connected to this world, or if giving him Prozac could boost his chances of recovery as it had done for mice in a study last year. A company named Iris launched a first version of that type of assistant. The machine can currently read the abstract of a paper, map out its key concepts, and find papers relevant to those concepts. It provides a quick way to get a sense of the scientific landscape for a given topic, something especially useful when you don't know the exact keywords for the type of research you are looking for.

A Wired article explains how Google is now using machine learning to understand and produce featured snippets in the Google search results. Google "just went live" on their desktop search results with what they call "sentence-compression algorithms." This sentence compression is able to learn how "to take a long sentence or paragraph from a relevant page on the web and extract the upshot -- the information you're looking for," Wired added. In short, Google is getting better at looking at content on the web and extracting the specific nuggets of information that directly answer the query. With Google Home, Google Assistant and the increase of featured snippets in the search results, it is no surprise Google is advancing their technology around this challenge.

This year has been a pivotal one for artificial intelligence, which has gone from an abstract and esoteric concept understood primarily through it's portrayal in sci-fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator series (no wonder it's typically regarded as malevolent) to the centre-piece of todays zeitgeist as the singularity (the point when artificial intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human) draws near. Hyper personalisation and proactive intelligence have become expectations of software in 2016, and the big players in mobile and digital are striving for this through AI. The result is that we're tipping into another fundamental paradigm shift akin to the explosion of mobile. Let's take a look at some of the best of AI in 2016 and what we can expect in 2017 and beyond for industry, creativity and humanity. Greek mythology talks about mechanical humans, robots and artificial intelligences and it was all the way back in 1951 that the first AI capable of playing chess was shown off courtesy of the university of Manchester.